Despite evidence to the contrary, Trump has repeatedly insisted that illegal immigration to the U.S. is contributing to a wave of crime. During the 2016 campaign, he famously referred to immigrants from Mexico as "bad hombres" and said most were "drug dealers, criminals, rapists!"

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Citing one study conducted by four universities, The New York Times wrote in March that data show, "a large majority of the [metropolitan] areas have many more immigrants today than they did in 1980 and fewer violent crimes. The Marshall Project extended the study's data up to 2016, showing that crime fell more often than it rose even as immigrant populations grew almost across the board."

Have you checked in with legal immigrants to see how they feel about illegal immigrants - my wife hates the idea of illeagal immigrants who have not stood in line, gotten a sponsor - and most of all, have not sworn to aphold the constitution and have allegiance to the USA. Because she's an immigrant (with a big mouth) she often gets other immigrants to come out of their shells and voice their negative opinions against illegals.

That's the problem with you people - you dan't have a clue, but sound off as though you know what you're talking about.

Have you checked in with legal immigrants to see how they feel about illegal immigrants - my wife hates the idea of illeagal immigrants who have not stood in line, gotten a sponsor - and most of all, have not sworn to aphold the constitution and have allegiance to the USA. Because she's an immigrant (with a big mouth) she often gets other immigrants to come out of their shells and voice their negative opinions against illegals.

That's the problem with you people - you dan't have a clue, but sound off as though you know what you're talking about.

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You can pretend that folks are or are not "animals" based upon bureaucratic classifications. That's not a prejudice that I share. Doing what one feels one needs to do to keep one's family alive is not something that makes me hate or demean people.

Your alienation that compels you to label the vast majority of Americans - presumably including the Koch Brothers - as "you people" is quite amusing.

Of course, comprehensive immigration reform is needed. DACA is only one widely supported aspect.

Try to keep up, just check out the threads that show Trump was talking about MS-13 with that statement. When you look at MSM headlines, it's easy to be fooled.

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Trump did not once refer to "MS-13". This is his rant:

“We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.”
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MS-13 members are not released when apprehended, certainly not "repeatedly."

Well, they are more libertarian (free markets) than a political ideologue. Still doesn't mean they are going to back Dems. AS they did in the past, they are probably going to back TEA party members or the LP.

Trump's constant evocations of undefined "animals" has been repeatedly used to dehumanize non-whites by implication. "Criminals! Rapists!"

An alt-right killer in Charlottesville or a Dylan Roof is never called an "animal" by Trump. Only Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims - frequently.

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Why is it any insult by the left is justified but any insult by the right is considered so offensive? You don't think calling conservatives Nazi's, racists, homophobes isn't meant to dehumanize them? So much sanctimonious faux outrage. You can dish it out, but you can't take it. What did the Left say when Sarah Sanders was viciously insulted? Oh, that was OK and the Right are snowflakes if they can't take it. Back at you Poindexter.

Why is it any insult by the left is justified but any insult by the right is considered so offensive?

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Who is your "left"?

I would only refer to Trump's self-proclaimed neo-nazi and white supremacists who hail him as their "Glorious Leader!" as such.

Why does Trump constantly dehumanize only non-White people?

Trump’s long history of referring to nonwhite criminals as ‘animals’
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One of the defining moments in New York City’s struggle against violent crime three decades ago came after the brutal rape and assault of a woman who was jogging through Central Park. Several young black and Hispanic men were arrested in connection with that crime after witnesses said they saw a large group of teenagers assaulting and harassing park patrons before the rape occurred…

“In full-page ads, Donald Trump seemed to call for nothing short of a pogrom against these youngsters: ‘I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger,’ ” Payne wrote. “Trump, his bulldozers ever at the ready, called for the death penalty.”

Those full-page ads by Trump that ran in the city’s tabloids included some of the dehumanizing language that Payne was concerned about. Families were afraid to walk in the park, Trump wrote, thanks to “roving bands of wild criminals” roaming through the city.

Five of the young men accused of the rape were convicted — only to be exonerated years later after a serial rapist admitted to the crime.

On Wednesday, now-President Trump again compared alleged criminals to animals during a conversation at the White House.

Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims was expressing frustration at new restrictions that made it harder for officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to learn about criminal suspects in her jail.

“There could be an MS-13 member I know about,” she said, referring to a brutal gang. “If they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.”

Trump replied: “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.”

Trump’s equating criminal immigrants to animals struck a chord. The Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez had a thoughtful thread on Twitter explaining why the equivalence was fraught.

“This is a textbook case of how dehumanizing and racist rhetoric works,” Sanchez wrote. “The question references a hypothetical MS-13 member. Trump immediately pivots to a vaguer ‘people trying to come into the country’ who we’re ‘taking out.’ The point of that move is precisely to conflate groups: ‘people trying to come in’ —> gang members —> ‘not people, animals.’ Spend five minutes on any racist message board and you’ll find a dozen instances of the trope.”

Sanchez noted that Trump’s comments about some specific people accused of bad acts are more nuanced, such as when he addressed the August killing of civil rights activist Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. Trump was unwilling to call that act terrorism, saying that “the driver of the car is a disgrace to himself, his family, and this country” but that using the word “terrorism” in that instance meant that “you get into legal semantics.” The violence of the day, he said, showed that there “was blame on both sides” of the pro-Nazi/anti-Nazi debate.

“But those nebulous ‘people trying to come into the country,’ ” Sanchez wrote, “don’t require that sort of individualized consideration. We can casually talk about ‘bad people’ and then dispense with the pretense of troubling ourselves about their humanity at all.”

As the Central Park Five example makes clear, though, Trump’s description of specific criminals as nonhuman isn’t unprecedented. It has been a feature of his rhetoric over the course of his campaign and his presidency. But the purpose of doing so has been, as Sanchez noted, to paint large groups with a broad brush.

A month before he declared his candidacy in 2015, Trump described the black killers of two police officers in Mississippi as “deranged animals.” After the terrorist attacks in Paris that November, the terrorists were “animals” taking advantage of what he described as lax gun laws in France. In early December, members of the Islamic State militant group were “a vicious group of animals.”

A few days later, he said that when terrorist “animals” attacked the World Trade Center in 2001, they sent their wives back to Saudi Arabia beforehand and the wives knew what was planned. That is not true.

On the day of the Iowa caucuses, he told a crowd that the Paris attackers were animals. “The press called them masterminds, the mastermind,” he said. “They’re not masterminds — they’re animals. We have to stop it. We have to be so tough. We have to be so vigilant.”

“Can you imagine these people, these animals over in the Middle East, that chop off heads, sitting around talking and seeing that we’re having a hard problem with waterboarding?” he said during a presidential debate in March 2016.

“An immigrant from Syria, who later applied and received United States citizenship, was accused by federal prosecutors of planning to go to a military base in Texas and kill three or four American soldiers,” he said during a speech in Portland, Maine, in August of that year. “Preferably execution-style. We’re dealing with animals.”

Over and over and over. It served his goals on the campaign trail — to present himself as a tough, strong response to the dual threats of terrorism and criminal immigrants that he was simultaneously hyping.

Once he was president, the “animals” descriptor was generally applied to members of MS-13, founded by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles in the 1980s.

“They don’t like to shoot people,” he said of members of that gang during a speech in Iowa last year. “They like to cut people. They do things that nobody can believe. These are true animals.”

“You’ve seen the stories about some of these animals,” he said in Youngstown in July, telling a story about a killing of a teenage girl. “These are the animals that we’ve been protecting for so long.”

“We’re going to have safety,” he said at a rally in Florida in December. “And we have got a lot more now. We are getting rid of the MS-13 animals.” During a Cabinet meeting later that month, it was: “We’re decimating those animals. They’re animals.”

“Animals” is so ingrained in his rhetoric about immigrant criminals and terrorists — a group defined in part by themselves being foreigners, as his Charlottesville response makes clear — that he applies it liberally and often.

The most dramatic example came in July, during a speech in front of a group of law enforcement officials on Long Island. This was the speech in which Trump casually suggested that police allow criminal suspects to hit their heads on the doors of police cars as they are being arrested.

Over the course of that speech, Trump’s narrative arc was clear. He was on Long Island because of its population of MS-13 members. He worked his way upward from some anecdotes about criminal acts by those gang members to suggest that all immigrants posed a danger.

First, he disparaged what he called “an open-door policy” for immigrants from Central America under President Barack Obama, a policy that was meant to address rising gang violence in that region. As a result, Trump said, “MS-13 surged into the country and scoured, and just absolutely destroyed, so much in front of it.” In the last three years of Obama’s administration, Trump said, “more than 150,000 unaccompanied alien minors arrived at the border and were released all throughout our country into United States communities.” He said 4,000 came to the county where he was speaking — and seven, he said, were “indicted for murder.”

That’s the argument: Referring to seven people indicted on murder charges is meant to cause concern about all of those immigrants from Central America. To Sanchez’s point, calling them “animals” makes it easier to classify all immigrants as dangerous and more threatening.

“I was reading — one of these animals was caught — in explaining, they like to knife them and cut them, and let them die slowly because that way it’s more painful, and they enjoy watching that much more,” he said at another point. “These are animals.”

The comments of one person, used to vilify 150,000 immigrants. Just as he used the December 2015 attack in San Bernardino, Calif., to call for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. His rhetoric about terrorist “animals” expanded outward to anyone who putatively shared their religion.

Three days after Trump launched his campaign, Dylann Roof entered a church in Charleston, S.C., and killed nine black men and women during a prayer meeting. Trump tweeted about that, too.

Well, they are more libertarian (free markets) than a political ideologue. Still doesn't mean they are going to back Dems. AS they did in the past, they are probably going to back TEA party members or the LP.

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The Kochs are allocating their resources to promote politicians who support DACA without regard to their party affiliation.

If more Republican politicians support DACA, they'll benefit more from the brothers' largesse.

Of course, Trump did not specify or even once mention "MS-13" in his latest attempt to dehumanize.

“This is a textbook case of how dehumanizing and racist rhetoric works,” Sanchez wrote. “The question references a hypothetical MS-13 member. Trump immediately pivots to a vaguer ‘people trying to come into the country’ who we’re ‘taking out.’ The point of that move is precisely to conflate groups: ‘people trying to come in’ —> gang members —> ‘not people, animals.’ Spend five minutes on any racist message board and you’ll find a dozen instances of the trope.”
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Of course, Trump did not specify or even once mention "MS-13" in his latest attempt to dehumanize.

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do you not understand the first concept of discussion he was responding to someone who mentioned MS-13.

See this is why we say you have Trump derangement syndrome because you take leave of reality in order to fabricate this hate narrative.

You are dead wrong and you know you are you're being dishonest. But I know because I understand facts and don't devolve into this diluted nonsense I'm just a Trumpster or whatever these cutesy little words you ***** makeup and think are funny to describe someone who doesn't think Trump is the absolute devil

You can pretend that folks are or are not "animals" based upon bureaucratic classifications. That's not a prejudice that I share. Doing what one feels one needs to do to keep one's family alive is not something that makes me hate or demean people.

Your alienation that compels you to label the vast majority of Americans - presumably including the Koch Brothers - as "you people" is quite amusing.

Of course, comprehensive immigration reform is needed. DACA is only one widely supported aspect.

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I save "you people" for people like you who are becoming a shrinking minority because of your hateful rhetoric against President Trump nnd his supprorters. When you mention "animals" I'm assuminhg you're referring to President Trump stating that MS-13 gang members arew animals. They are animals.

When you say "DACA is only one widely supported aspect" you are of course joking. Most Americans want to send ALL of them back with the exception of those few who are real Americans.

do you not understand the first concept of discussion he was responding to someone who mentioned MS-13.

See this is why we say you have Trump derangement syndrome because you take leave of reality in order to fabricate this hate narrative.

You are dead wrong and you know you are you're being dishonest. But I know because I understand facts and don't devolve into this diluted nonsense I'm just a Trumpster or whatever these cutesy little words you ***** makeup and think are funny to describe someone who doesn't think Trump is the absolute devil

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Why do you suppose that Trump has a long, documented history of dehumanizing Blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims as "animals" but, apparently, never a White person?